Children Say They Witnessed Child Murders

Children
Say They Witnessed Child Murders

By Jennifer Kerr
Associated Press Writer
Sacramento, CA (AP)

January 18, 1985 Paper:
Mobile Register (Mobile, AL) Page: 37

Three children say men accused of running a child
sex ring were present when three other youngsters were hit on the head with a
pipe and cut up while cameras recorded the scene, a prosecutor said Thursday.
Municipal Court Judge John Stroud refused to reduce the $500,000 bail for two
of the five defendants, Alan Arbuckle and Veryl Baker of Sacramento.

Stroud agreed to delay until January 25 the bail
reduction motions by attorneys for the other defendants, Arthur Gary Dill and
John Holman of Campbell and Rolando Cuevas of Sacramento. All five are charged
with a total of 169 felony counts of child molestation. Documents released by
the court this week claim Dill, a former restaurant manager, and the four
waiters who worked for him forced Dill’s four children and five other children –
all between 4 and 10 years old- to have sex with adults, who paid up to $85, in
1982.

Attorneys for Arbuckle and Baker said the charges
were fabricated by Dill’s estranged wife and her mother, who they said let the
Dill children read books about incest and satanic cults. They argued that their
bail was too high.

Deputy District Attorney Rick Lewkowitz said the
charges were serious enough and could result in a prison term of 480 years for
Dill, who is charged with 64 counts, the largest number.

“It is hard to imagine a more serious case than
this. We have nine alleged victims, traumatized victims, six are in therapy,
two are in locked facilities (because of) … the trauma inflicted on them.”

In addition, Lewkowitz said, “there is a pending
homicide investigation. We do not feel we have sufficient evidence at this
point to file charges.”

He said three children told investigators they were
taken to a basement and “there were three children there and those three
children were given drugs and put to sleep and Mr. Baker took a metal pipe to
the head of each of these children.”

He said the children said the nine children present
were placed around the three beds where the unconscious children lay “and they
were given cutting instruments, knives, while cameras and film was going… and
they indicated very vivid details as to placing instruments into the bodies …
the cutting up of the bodies.”

Lewkowitz said the three children “indicated all
five of these defendants were present.”

Police have been unable to find any bodies or film.

Tom Roehr, a public defender representing Baker,
said the charges resulted from the anger of Dill’s estranged wife, Claudia, and
her mother, Doris Bell, over the breakup of the marriage in 1983.

Roehr said Mrs. Bell “has been obsessed with sexual
molestation” because another daughter was molested by her husband as a
teen-ager.

“She loaded herself up with some guilt. After she
failed to see molestation where there was some, she is seeing it where it is
not,” he said.

He said Mrs. Bell has several books about incest,
child molestation and satanic cults involving children and admitted to
investigators that the Dill children had access to them. He said Mrs. Bell was
writing a book about the molestation of her daughter, titled “The Terrible
Thing That Happened to Dolly.”

Roehr said there is no basement in the Dill house,
where the activities were alleged to have occurred.